'...and the life everlasting ' by The Venerable Peter Sutton 3 September 2023
The Sermon preached at Evensong on Sunday 3 September
The Venerable Peter Sutton
2 Kings 6:24-25; 7:3-end Acts 18:1-16 Psalm 105:1-15
‘ and the life everlasting’ - it comes right at the very end of the Creed and almost suggests that the afterlife is an afterthought.
Perhaps because it is such a difficult a concept to get a handle on, we tend to let this credal statement hover around as an awkwardness – rather like Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia – the feared and ever-present reality – best not worried about until the moment arrives. We tend not to think about it –
so let’s think about it now.
If we believe in the life everlasting it’s easier to begin by saying what it isn’t. For starters, the life everlasting isn’t restricted to members of the Church of England. That should be a relief to us all - no longer will we need the Church Representation Rules or the abundance of Anglican paraphernalia.
It won’t be what we expect because it remains beyond the beyondness of our knowledge and imagination. It won’t be as syrupy as some deepest sympathy cards suggest and thankfully it won’t be possible to locate it geographically by GPS – so no parish or diocesan boundaries - and no deliveries from Amazon. It won’t have Wi-Fi - it is something totally other. The life everlasting becomes all the more attractive when we think of the things that it isn’t.
The saying that ‘we come into this world with nothing and leave it with nothing’ is only part true. We might leave this life without the material things that define us, but we are the sum total of our story, our experience, and our faith.
Clement Freud said that on his gravestone he wanted just the date of his death and above it the words: ‘best before’. I believe that the words ‘best after’ would be more appropriate.
Perhaps by leaving the afterlife as an afterthought we undersell the greatest promise that Jesus made for those who followed him. He wasn’t specific about what it looks like but he told the rich young man with too much stuff, and the lawyer who provoked the story of the Good Samaritan, what’s need to do enjoy it. And of course it begins now, not just when we die.
The Old Testament reading tells the story of lepers living outside a city fearing death. The city is in lockdown besieged by the Arameans who are camped just down the road. The lepers are facing death from disease and starvation. They have been made homeless and evicted from their the city where food was scarce and inflation out of control – it sounds so familiar – so chancing their luck they go to the enemy camp down the road in search of food. When they arrive, the camp is deserted, God has done the miraculous and sent the enemy into retreat because God made them hear the sound of chariots and horses. The lepers helped themselves to food and looted tents before returning to the city with their news. It is a story about God turning human expectations upside down. For the hopeless there is hope and the unbelievable became believable. God enabled the impossible to become possible; the enemy was gone, food was available and even the rate of inflation back to normal. God who cannot supposedly be limited by our rules of play turns normal military strategy on its head.
For Karl Marx, the life everlasting was a false promise, a means of consoling those who have no joy in this world and who cannot be heard or helped by the state which is the opposite of what Jesus said. Just as the Kingdom of God begins now so the resurrection life is a continuation of God’s life, it has no ending – just as it has no recognisable beginning. My experience of people in the very worst of situations is that they do already believe in the life everlasting even though we as a church sit quietly to it. Perhaps we should say the Creed more loudly!
My favourite literary image of life after death is not from the Bible but from the novel ‘Gilead’ by Marilyne Robinson and in this case it is life after the death of a church. The book is a letter from an old minister in small town America to his very young son – a sort of testament – to read when he grows up. It’s a sort of: ‘these are the things I want you to know’.
In his letter he recalls an old wooden church that had burnt down. The church had died and the sorrowing community, mourning their church are gently dismantling the charred remains, taking and burying the smoky burnt hymn books from the embers. Its all the more miserable because this work is being done in constant drizzling rain. The whole community came out to witness the end of the church on a sad, wet, grey miserable day. The old minister, describing the scene to his son who was then a toddler sitting on a tarpaulin under cover of a wagon. Too young to know what was happening, the toddler just watched the proceedings. In a moment of respite the old man came over to give the child a biscuit. The biscuit, wet in the drizzle and made dirty by the soot from the old man’s fingers he describes in his testament as an act of communion - a reminder that out of death, out of the sadness, the pain, the misery, out of the ashes … comes life. Not a resuscitated life with the creation of yet another building to replace the old but a resurrection life that exists in the depths of our shared relationships, our shared experience and story, our shared faith and mostly of course in the depth of our relationship with God.
That image is all the more pertinent post pandemic as we re-explore what communion is and how we do it; what we can touch and what we can’t; what’s communicated … and what isn’t. The power and the beauty of the dirty old hands pass on the story which lives on in the written account and in the new and resurrected and imagined memories of the little boy.
So I can’t tell you what the life everlasting looks like but I believe that it has begun and continues to be. It is what my story, my experience and my faith tells to be true.
Which is why the afterthought of the afterlife is such a rich and nourishing way to conclude a Creed because it shouts out, or should, that this is not the end. God is beyond the beyondness of our knowledge and imagination.
Jesus promised life and that life didn’t just mean the period of time between birth and death. He taught the ways by which we can enjoy that life just as He lives now is the ever-present reminder that the life everlasting is for all.
The Church as we know it is changing, some would say the institution is dying, just not so quickly as the burnt down church in the story. Whilst its decline is saddening we shouldn’t be too down hearted and we must play our part in its new life.
It is Christ we worship not the Church.
That is why I love the imagery of Marilynne Robinson’s old man handing over a blackened soggy biscuit with a sooty hand. The communion with and in Christ gives us communion with each other – the sign of our faith, our relationship with each other and with God. The Creed reminds us that that our God relationship has no end.
St John Chrysostom said that “a comprehended god is no god’. For people of faith just because we cannot explain or understand something doesn’t take away its truth. God, in the words of the hymn remains: ‘a sea without a shore, a sun without a sphere, where time is now and evermore’ – we can’t limit God. No matter the extent of our arrogance or sense of self-importance. No matter how clever we think we are we cannot limit God.
It is Deitrich Bonhoeffer who helps me to make sense of it most. In April of 1945 on being taken to execution by the Nazis his belief that ‘death is swallowed up in victory’ was communicated in his last known words. Bonhoeffer facing death said: ‘This is for me, the end – the beginning of life’.
So perhaps when we recite the Creed let’s not let the afterlife be an afterthought. We might be too Anglican to shout out the last line but maybe we can allow the words to permeate more deeply, to mean more as we shape our lives, in the communion we share and in the living Christ we serve.
…and the life everlasting, and everlasting, and everlasting. Amen.